What is the experience of true compassion? While recognizing mind
essence, there's some sense of being wide awake and free. At the
same time, there's some tenderness that arises without any cause
or condition. There is a deep-felt sense of being tender. Not sad
in a depressed way, but tender, and somewhat delighted at the
same time. There's a mixture. There's no sadness for oneself. Nor
is there sadness for anyone in particular, either. It's like
being saturated with juice, just like an apple is full of juice.

Progressive and Direct-Path
Teachings - Greg Goode

Discusses how direct-path teachings differ
from progressive-path teachings, and characterizes nondual
realization as "seeing the cover come off" and
recognizing what was underneath as having been present all
along.Truth with non-dual teacher, Greg Goode. http://www.heartofnow.com -- Filmed by Roger Ingraham http://www.rogeringraham.com

I
dont think that new technologies alone will save
us. What will get us through the evolutionary bottleneck
is a change of heart, which will come about when we begin
to see nature not as a resource but as a sentient
master. Interview by David Kupfer

Biologist and science writer Janine
Benyus helped chart a new path for industrial designers in 1997
with her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (Harper Perennial). Since then, she says, her
job has been to teach engineers, scientists, and inventors how to
consult lifes genius to create sustainable
designs. She coined the term biomimicry from
the Greek bios, meaning life, and mimesis,
meaning to imitate. The first step she advises in
solving a problem is to look at the solutions that can be found
in nature. Time magazine named her one of its
Heroes of the Environment, and physicist Amory Lovins
wrote in Time that her work will change your life.
It has already changed mine. And it may save the world.

Kupfer: What is
biomimicry?

Benyus: Biomimicry is the
practice of borrowing natures design principles to create
more-sustainable products and processes. When designers,
engineers, architects, chemists, city planners, and so on have a
problem to solve, I encourage them to ask, What part of the
natural world has already done what Im trying to do?
With biomimicry we look to design principles in nature as
examples for good behavior. I think of it as becoming
natures apprentice.

Kupfer: How did you
discover this idea?

Benyus: I had written five
books  natural histories, wildlife guides, ecosystem
guides, animal-behavior studies  and Id been watching
how nature knits itself together. In 1990 I asked myself, Are
any designers and inventors trying to mimic the designs of the
natural world?

Once Id asked the question, a
blizzard of examples arrived at my door: people studying
photosynthesis to create better solar cells; engineers examining
how spiders make their webs; pharmacologists researching how
organisms self-medicate. I learned about such burgeoning fields
as industrial ecology, which looks at ecosystems as models for
new economic patterns. In agriculture I heard about how Wes
Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, says we could replace our
monoculture crops of annuals with a mix of perennials based on
the natural ecology of prairies.

I started collecting these examples in a
file I labeled Biomimicry. Then there were two files,
then a whole drawer, and then a whole filing cabinet. Finally I
wrote a book about this new field, never imagining it would catch
on the way it has. The architecture community picked up on it
first, and then the industrial-design community. Suddenly all
these groups wanted a biologist at their tables.

Dayna Baumeister, who was working on a PhD
in coevolution biology at the University of Montana, called me up
and said that as soon as shed read my book, she knew: This
is what I want to do. We became partners, teaching workshops
for designers, architects, and engineers and doing consulting for
companies. For instance, if a company wanted to invent a new
glue, we would tell them how geckos adhere to walls and how
mussels glue themselves to rocks underwater  examples of
natures nontoxic ways of adhering. The plywood used to
build most houses is stuck together with an adhesive that emits
formaldehyde. But with the help of scientists who study
natures adhesives, Columbia Forest Products, the largest
plywood manufacturer in the country, switched to a glue that
mimics the adhesive mussels use. They make it out of soy flour.

Today we have twelve full-time biologists
on staff. We create Amoeba through Zebra reports, in
which a designer, inventor, or architect asks us a question
 like How does nature reduce vibration? 
and we answer it. Biomimicry is not about harvesting
natures resources but about sitting at her feet as
students.